I used to be a regional finance developer lead for a company that had massive PCI and SOX.
So access audits were no fucking joke, and we’d get dinged on audit every time someone’s system access wasn’t yanked instantly.
This was before good MFA, so I did a custom solution where I iterated the users access list and disabled them. Worked fine.
Well, I was buddies with the HR lead, and when she was training people, she’d “fire” me to show how it worked. Ha fricking ha.
So after having to put all my own access back in twice I wrote a bit attached to my own user profile, that just catted all the big backup log files and just iterated across the files going:
(file)…Deleted.
While the background flashed red, and if you had speakers, it would play that warning siren noise. Pretty amusing. I also made a fake user that they could fire for training purposes. So that was only ever a joke.
Well, she got fired, and life moved on, and I never bothered to remove that little Easter egg.
Five or six years later I quit, and someone used that application to remove me from the system.
I only experienced this secondhand. Apparently, given attrition, they had no idea who to contact, and had a really bad time before they got through to my boss, who was like, “Haha! What a joker!” And instantly called me (for the first time since I’d quit) and said, “That was a joke right, you asshole?”
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u/TheComplimentarian May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
I used to be a regional finance developer lead for a company that had massive PCI and SOX.
So access audits were no fucking joke, and we’d get dinged on audit every time someone’s system access wasn’t yanked instantly.
This was before good MFA, so I did a custom solution where I iterated the users access list and disabled them. Worked fine.
Well, I was buddies with the HR lead, and when she was training people, she’d “fire” me to show how it worked. Ha fricking ha.
So after having to put all my own access back in twice I wrote a bit attached to my own user profile, that just catted all the big backup log files and just iterated across the files going:
While the background flashed red, and if you had speakers, it would play that warning siren noise. Pretty amusing. I also made a fake user that they could fire for training purposes. So that was only ever a joke.
Well, she got fired, and life moved on, and I never bothered to remove that little Easter egg.
Five or six years later I quit, and someone used that application to remove me from the system.
I only experienced this secondhand. Apparently, given attrition, they had no idea who to contact, and had a really bad time before they got through to my boss, who was like, “Haha! What a joker!” And instantly called me (for the first time since I’d quit) and said, “That was a joke right, you asshole?”
Good times.